Library Trends 75(2) "Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality," Guest Edited by Robin Bradford and Me is Now Available for Free

18 months ago, Robin and I had this post officially opening our call for papers for Library Trends 75(2) "Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality." But our journey toward getting to that call for papers began 6 months before that when Managing Editor, Melissa Wong approached the two of us to float the idea of this issue and our role as Guest Editors. 

That's 2 years from the idea to this moment when we received this email, late last week, from the folks who publish Library Trends:

We are pleased to share that Library Trends 75 (2), “Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality,” has been published. It is available for free online in Project Muse and by mail order from Johns Hopkins University Press. Congratulations on this achievement!

I want to focus on that last word achievement because this is an achievement for Robin and I, sure, but it is for all of us. Robin and I have discussed this many times,  but we never saw ourselves ever editing an academic journal. Not because we didn't think we could. We have both written books, good books, books people have read and use in their work in libraries all over the world.

Rather, we never saw ourselves doing an academic journal because the academic library world does not hold the work we do -- crafting collections and matching books with readers through the public library -- in high enough regard to include it in the academic realm. 

This is the first academic journal dedicated solely to RA and collection development. Robin and I are so proud to add these important services to the academic scholarship of librarianship. It has been published and no one can take ti back now.

Our work giving people leisure reading options has been relegated into the shadows of the academic realm for years. And I say this as someone who taught the RA class at the graduate level for 8 years. And we both say this as people who have written textbooks for library workers. But here we are, today, with a well regarded academic library journal handing over the keys to an entire issue to Robin and I, allowing us to make a call for papers and craft a journal all about the work every one of you reading this does every single day.

Kudos to Melissa Wong and her team at the very well-regarded Library Trends though, they saw the need and went to Robin and I, two proven experts with publishing experience.

We are both happy we got this experience. The academic journal process was foreign to us and Wong and her team were there to help us every step of the way. And trust me, we had a lot of questions, but they never made us feel like a burden for asking them.

And now, we have this almost 300 page tome of brand new scholarship on collection development and readers advisory. The articles are fantastic. They each add something new to the work all of us do every day. And it is all FREE for you to read, use to justify your service to readers, to inspire you to try something new, and more.

We are so proud of this issue. More proud that either of us imagined we could be when we started. And definitely more proud than when we were in the thick of the peer review and editing phases six months ago. 

Coming February 2027-- we will also have webinars highlighting our authors hosted by The University of Illinois iSchool and Booklist. More details soon.

To celebrate the publication and to make sure all of you have access to it, I am doing a few things. 

1. I will be posting 2-3 articles a week over the next 6 weeks here on the blog. I will provide the summary of each article, some context, and a link. I am hoping that by breaking it up, I make it less overwhelming for you to read the full issue.
2. Everything will be tagged "Library Trends" to make it easier to pull them all up, today, tomorrow, and years in the future because some of this scholarship is ground breaking.
3. For those who cannot wait, I created this page where you can access the issue from RA for All's main page at anytime. I have posted each article with the direct link to read it immediately and included the one article that got cut just before the final draft was approved.

All of it is available at this link from Project Muse to read anytime online and it even allows you 1 free PDF download.

Today I want to begin with the introduction Robin and I wrote for the entire issue:

Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality: An Introduction

Robin Bradford, Becky Spratford

pp. 225-237

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2026.a1005541

From the first paragraph of our essay:

This issue of Library Trends begins with and builds upon our work in Antiracist Readers’ Advisory, a program that itself was born, quite honestly, from frustration, after we found ourselves attending the same conferences, speaking on the same panels, and presenting about buying diverse books and providing readers’ advisory services for diverse materials. Over and over again. The frustration came from trying to do justice to these topics in fifteen- to thirty-minute bursts. We were hitting the same main points repeatedly, conference after conference. While that was fine for an introduction, and we knew people were getting some information, we realized not only that library workers needed more robust training but also—and this was key to everything that came after and all that you will encounter in this publication—that the collection development and readers’ advisory that we were each presenting on separately were more intertwined than even we had realized. And we were not alone in this thinking.

We go on to share the story of our experience training libraries through our Actively Anti-Racist Service to Readers programs. 

And then, toward the end we introduce the entire issue, which I am sharing here to get you excited to go and read the articles for yourselves:

Again, in the coming weeks, expect 2-3 articles and their authors to be highlighted here on the blog. I will go in order through the table of contents, but again, you can access it all in any order, at any time here.

We are presenting Library Trends, volume 75, issue 2, “Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality,” in three distinct sections, building from foundational concepts to practical services for readers of all ages. Section I, “Laying the Groundwork for Twenty-First-Century Readers’ Advisory Service,” features four articles that establish the foundation upon which we believe twenty-first-century readers’ advisory service should be built. The authors look at service to readers from theoretical and educational perspectives. To that end, we are elated to begin with Avery Alexander and Rebecca Reeves presenting the original research they conducted [End Page 234] as part of their master’s degree program at the University of Washington, taking a deep dive into how significant cultural events and personal stressors have impacted reading and library usage for patrons and library personnel and how library workers connect with communities. Their instructor for that program, Misha Stone, along with Emil Lawrence, a professor from Rutgers, follow with a pedagogical conversation about how they promote a critical disposition in their respective classrooms in order to initiate a larger discussion about visions for readers’ advisory education and practice that center responsiveness to the real world in which library patrons orchestrate their reading lives. Next, four librarians—Michael Adams, Catherine Bryant, Abby Dawson, and Ellen Forsyth—from New South Wales, Australia, pick up this educational conversation by sharing how they created a localized, collaborative, and efficient training model to deliver readers’ advisory–focused professional development in an online context. Finally, the section concludes with Karen Toonen presenting an argument for how to properly weed a popular reading collection, an activity for a type of collection that has been mostly ignored in the existing literature on weeding.

Section II, “Building a Community of Readers from Birth Through College,” consists of four articles that examine how we serve our youngest readers as they grow into the adult readers who will come to use our services in the public library. Julie Jurgens sets the stage with a provocative and incisive exploration of America’s history of prejudice against children and systemic lack of support for families. She compares and contrasts this with actual best practices regarding child development, caregiving styles, and how children actually engage with books. The result is a model for us to reframe the narrative regarding children’s access to books, one where children are active participants in making the choices that directly impact their lives, starting with the small but significant act of choosing what books they want to read. Raenell “Rain” M. Smith and Michele Reilly follow Jurgens with a case study on crafting a readers’ advisory program within a high school setting that centers students’ needs while creating lifelong learners and pleasure readers. This section concludes with two case studies of serving college students. Tyler Rodrigues writes about the University of Idaho’s Hit the Book(s) Club, discussing observations derived from the program and the benefits seen from student testimonials. Amanda M. Lowe and Lauren Puzier present how the University at Albany Libraries reframed readers’ advisory as an active, student-centered strategy that supports wellness, intellectual curiosity, and engagement.

And finally, in section III, “Fostering Community and Belonging Through Readers’ Advisory in the Public Library,” we present six articles that showcase how readers’ advisory service is about more than putting the right book into our readers’ hands; rather, it can be a pathway toward what should be the ultimate goal of all public library service—creating [End Page 235] community and fostering belonging. This section leads off with Carina Stopenski proposing an additional appeal factor for the deeply entrenched appeal-based system used by readers’ advisors around the world, coining the phrase “emotional-situational appeal” and explaining how it can be used to connect with neurodivergent readers. Next, Adam Lopez explains how queer book clubs at his library have fostered empathy and built support for queer people throughout their Kansas community. Wang Junfei shares the results of a user experience study of reader services on urban rail transit in Zhejiang Province, China. We then bring you back over the Pacific Ocean to Springfield, Missouri, where Konrad Stump explains how he has used programming centered around books and authors to build community investment in readers’ advisory, while Stephanie Sendaula follows with an article about the importance of nonfiction readers’ advisory as a tool for social justice. This issue ends on a very practical note, as Sara McBride and Chantal Wilson share how Richland Library in Columbia, South Carolina, has been encouraging readers to expand their reading horizons with the Broader Bookshelf reading challenge since 2017.

Now, it is your turn. We invite you to join us on this curated journey, as we present a model for what twenty-first-century collection development and readers’ advisory should look like, through the words of those who are already setting the standard and pushing their ideas and concepts forward, with the ultimate goal of preserving it all for others to study and use as an example to build upon for themselves going forward. Let us all rethink readers’ advisory for today’s reading reality together.

In the coming weeks, expect 2-3 articles and their authors to be highlighted here on the blog. I will go in order through the table of contents, but again, you can access it all in any order, at any time here.

Let's do this! Let's show those academics that we can stand toe to toe with them. 

Reminder: Backlist Can Become Frontlist At Any Time

In libraries we are usually ready for a previously popular book to come back into the public consciousness. Today's example is Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou:

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. 

For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. 

Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.

Back in 2018 this book was everywhere. And it stayed popular for quite a while. I did this book as a book discussion title in February of 2020 with ARRT and you can read the notes here.

I read it with my ears as an audiobook, so did my husband. Very few books overlap like that for us. It was bonkers to see what Elizabeth Holmes was able to do. It was also a refreshing true crime story that did not involve a serial killer.

Well, you all know where this is going..... Obviously Bad Blood is back and paperback sales of this book are, once again, through the roof as reported by PW here because of the popularity of the documentary You Can See Everything.

This book was still in most library collections because it was so critically acclaimed and Holmes had stayed in the news meaning people sought the book out on a regular enough basis that it was not weeded. And now, it is checked out in every possible format at most libraries (including my own). 

So first things first, good news if you still own it. Yes you can add more paperback copies or ebooks to satisfy demand. But also because it is an older title that was popular back when it first came out, there are MANY Reddit threads of readalike options. (Scroll past the AI options).

And there are also great threads of Reddit book suggestions for non-murder true crime.

We are not going to be able to keep adding copies to satisfy demand on this one. And, interest in this title isn't going away anytime soon. The movie will stay on the radar and in the mainstream discussion from now through the Academy Awards in March 2027.

So add what you can, but use this opportunity to make displays and lists of your MANY true crime offerings that are NOT murder-based that they can enjoy while they wait.

Viral books and movies bring people into the library, sometimes for the first time in years (and "into the library" is also if they only access us through Libby). Sure they will be slightly disappointed if Bad Blood isn't available. but when you show them so many other awesome choices to enjoy while they wait their turn, many (not all of course) will be excited to rediscover the library and all it has to offer.

And all of this is possible because we don't just keep the newest books on our shelves. We always have great titles from the past that are still great reads if only our patrons knew there were there, hiding in the stacks.

Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize Edition

 This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.

It is Election Day here in America. We could all use some levity-- AFTER VOTING. In fact, if you live in America and are reading this before you voted, please stop reading and go vote. I voted last week myself.

Okay back to today and needing some levity, I saved this post for today, the short list of books nominated for the Wodehouse Prize. From their about page:

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction is the UK’s longest running prize for comic fiction and is designed to highlight the funniest novel of the past twelve months, which best evokes the Wodehouse spirit of witty characters and perfectly timed comic prose. The prize was launched in 2000 on the 25th anniversary of the death of P.G. Wodehouse and 2025 marked the 25th anniversary of the award. Each year, the prize celebrates the novels that have genuinely made people laugh. Publishers are advised to focus their submissions for 2026 on books that really made them laugh out loud, in order to give them the best chance of being shortlisted.

These are books that are of high literary merit and are also funny. Books can be both and this prize has made that point crystal clear for many years. In fact, the entire backlist of nominated titles and winners going back to 2000 are cataloged here. 

The short list and juror statement about each book form this year's list are here and below:

A Good Person by Kirsten King – Published by Fleet (Little, Brown)

Lillian is having a great time with Henry: he's charming, well-educated, and exactly the kind of guy she'd like to end up with. That is, until she stays the night at his flat and they end up in a huge argument. Furious, Lillian seeks revenge on Henry by performing a drunken YouTube hex on him. But then Henry actually ends up dead. Desperate to control the narrative, clear her name, and assume her rightful place as Henry's mourning girlfriend, Lillian's pursuit of the truth will throw her into a dangerous tailspin, which just may just upend her life for good.

Stephanie Merritt said: “A wickedly funny reinvention of the revenge-plot comedy, with a gloriously deluded narrator. As you'd expect from a screenwriter, Kirsten King has a killer ear for dialogue, and so many of her lines made me laugh out loud.”

 Black Bag by Luke Kennard – Published by John Murray Press

A penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular if you can love someone secreted away inside a black bag. Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation… A warped campus novel, Black Bag is an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story.

Tristram Fane Saunders said: “Luke Kennard's utterly original campus novel nudges at serious questions - about art, authenticity and modern masculinity - but always with a light touch. It's a novel that achieves a marvellous balance between the mundane and the surreal.”

How To Lose a Lord in Ten Days by Sophie Irwin – Published by HarperCollins

He wants a wife. She wants to be jilted. This is war. Rich, handsome and titled, Lord Ashford has every lady in England longing for his hand in marriage. Everyone, that is, except Miss Lydia Hanworth – the only young woman Ashford wishes to marry. Pressured into accepting Ashford’s proposal, the announcement must be kept secret for ten days. Can Lydia free herself from her obligations before the engagement is publicly announced, without ruining her reputation? You can achieve an awful lot in ten days, after all…

Sophie Ratcliffe said: “Packed full of dukes, dowries, and double-edged wit, Irwin’s Regency spin on the classic romcom charmed the judges with its sly humour and period detail.”

Motherfaker by Anna Brook-Mitchell – Published by Macmillan

Barri Brown is a respected teacher and an upstanding citizen of Guernsey. She’s also down for a bit of law-breaking… At thirty-five, Barri spends her time slaving away as a teacher, getting passed over for promotions and constantly covering for colleagues with kids. When her husband vanishes – along with her savings – it’s the final straw. And so, she hatches a wild plan: fake a pregnancy and use the paid maternity leave to start over somewhere new. With seven foam bumps, a wardrobe full of smock dresses and a great pregnancy heist underway, all Barri has to do is blag it until she can disappear for good – without getting caught and being sent to prison for fraud. How hard could it be?

Tristram Fane Saunders said: “Could you fake a pregnancy just for the paid maternity leave – and get away with it? This outrageous, harebrained scheme is an irresistible premise for Anna Brook-Mitchell's farce, in which one lie soon leads into another. It's a warm, bighearted farce with a heroine you can't help rooting for.”

Offseason by Avigayl Sharp - Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion Publishing Group)

In Offseason, the fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal town. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens's Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she implicates everyone she meets in her quest to pin down where exactly her own life went wrong.

Stephanie Merritt said: “'Wry, deadpan, absurdist: Offseason perfectly skewers the self-absorption of contemporary life (and fiction) and finds comedy in the bleakest situations. It feels fresh, original and multi-layered; I loved its strangeness and dark humour.”

We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad – Published by Scribner UK (Simon & Schuster)

This is the highly anticipated follow up to the viral sensation Bunny. When We Love You, Bunny opens, Samantha Heather Mackey has just published her first novel to critical acclaim. But at a New England stop on her book tour, her one-time frenemies, furious at the way they’ve been portrayed, kidnap her. Now a captive audience, it’s her (and our) turn to hear the Bunnies’ side of the story. One by one, they take turns holding the axe, and recount the birth throes of their unholy alliance, their discovery of their unusual creative powers ― and the phantasmagorical adventure of conjuring their first creation.

James Naughtie said: “Mona Awad's horror-satire crackles with the same edgy pulse that made her first Bunny novel a phenomenon - exploring ruthlessly the social mayhem of a group of privileged Ivy League student women. Funny, bloody and irresistible.” 

Click through for more information about the award and this year's jurors.

A book that can make you laugh out loud is an evergreen choice. Make sure you have the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the archive of past winners bookmarked as a great resource to help readers find a book that is well constructed and will make them laugh. Especially during stressful times, humor is a great option.

While there are a lot of books to choose from, you can add to this resource and make it more locally focused by using the prize as a conversation starter to display option.

Your question for your community-- What is a book that made you laugh out loud?

Click here for more on how to turn a conversation starter into a display. In the mean time, get those Wodehouse Prize books-- short lister, winners, from past and present-- out on display. It's a stressful time in America right now and many could use a chuckle from their books.

Conversation Starter to Display Monthly Question: What Books Are You Most Grateful For?

This is part of a monthly series of conversation starters which can be made into evergreen displays that I first proposed here (with 12 examples that could last you full a year). You can expect a new conversation starter on the first week day of a new month. Use the newest one for the next month, or access the long backlist of these ideas anytime by using this link. 

Back in June, I wrote about how to use conversation starters to create evergreen displays (see link above), and in that post I promised to give you one conversation starter a month at the start of each month. I also make it clear in that post that these displays can be small. 3-5 books that you keep rotating. You can even use this link to make it into a scavenger hunt of small displays all over the library.

This month question is: What books are you most grateful for?

While this question, coming during the month when we all celebrate Thanksgiving is not a shocker, asking it can help you now -- to get a display up right away of the season, a display that will be diverse and inclusive because the answer is not tied to any one genre or age level AND it will help you understand what books in your collection hold the most meaning for your readers.

What books are you most grateful for?-- This is a question that everyone who is a reader can answer quickly; much more quickly than when you ask people to share a favorite book or the last good book they read. This is a question that has an immediate and visceral response. It is also a question that changes. I you ask someone this question today, you will get a few titles, but then ask them 6 months later and you will have a few more. 

And the answers are evergreen by default because people always need a pick me up from a good read and finding a book others are grateful for is an excellent recommendation 

Start by asking staff, What books are you most grateful for?- at the very least. Do it through an electronic form so that the answers get filed into a spreadsheet. And then do some searching.

The title of this display you make is the question itself: What books are you most grateful for?

Why? Because this is interactive. Your display is a conversation. It will draw patrons toward it, their interest piqued. You are asking them a question and presenting some answers, but they will have their own and they will want to tell you! It will invite everyone to participate. 

Now, you can follow my more elaborate suggestion on how to ask every patron to help answer this question and add titles to your spreadsheet of options, OR you can start smaller. Put up a white board or bulletin board near the display and allow people to add titles. You can pull them as needed or just leave them there, answers to your question, a way to SHOW your community that you care about their answers. You should be adding these to the spreadsheet overtime as well.

That spreadsheet is key here because it is a way for the library to KNOW what books matter to their patrons. Circulation statistics just show us what checks out. It doesn't tell us if they were enjoyed, let alone a book so treasured the patron recommends it to everyone they know. Asking this question makes an excellent, interactive, and, quite frankly, easy display, BUT it also gives us valuable collection development data.

First, if the books people are recommending to answer this question and their circ stats are not great, this lets us know that the book should stay in our collection. It alerts us that it is a patron fav and we now know to get it on display where another reader will almost certainly give it a try (with a title of a display like that, it is sure to circ now)

Second, this conversation starter allows us to see what books matter to our readers and we can pass that information on to those who buy the books for our collections so that they can look for similar titles. As someone who bought for the fiction collection, I would have loved to have this information. I knew my key patrons and bought books I knew they would like, but this question would have reach more people. Many who never stop to talk to use will answer. You will get a much wider view of the books your readers love and crave. That data is collection development gold!

You can search out readalikes that you have, and add more. All of that will lead to small displays, in the library or online, ones you can title, "These are the books our community is grateful for....now try these similar options." Those can be online and in small spaces. 

You are asking a question, getting responses to fill a display, gathering valuable collection development data, and then creating more displays. All by asking one question: What books are you most grateful for?

You have nothing to lose here. You and your patrons win the second you ask the question.

Back next month with anther question, but as always, use the link at the top of this post for many more questions you can use today, tomorrow, or in a few months. Just start asking your patrons questions so you can see what really sticks with them. Your displays will be easier to build, more inviting, and you will have a better sense of what other titles need to be added to your collections.

HWA Announces Summer Scares Reading Program 2027 Spokesperson and Timeline

HWA Announces Summer Scares Reading Program 2027 Spokesperson and Timeline

The Horror Writers Association (HWA), in partnership with Booklist, Book Riot, iREAD, and NoveList®, a division of EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO), is proud to announce the ninth annual Summer Scares, a reading program that provides libraries and schools with an annual list of recommended horror titles for adult, young adult (teen), and middle-grade readers. 

Summer Scares is proud to announce the 2027 spokesperson, USA Today Bestselling middle-grade author, Ally Russell:

“As a wee ghoul, my best friend and I would trade scary books like currency. We didn’t get to see each other often, but I lived for those weekend sleepovers, because I knew we would spend a lot of our time together talking about scary books. The last book I remember trading was Give Yourself Goosebumps: Night in Werewolf Woods by R.L. Stine. I don’t remember why we stopped trading; I suspect we simply outgrew the practice. Sharing scares with a friend and fellow reader at that young and pivotal age turned me into a lifelong reader. Reading doesn’t have to be a solitary act, and the Summer Scares program understands that. As a young aspiring author, books were my creative writing teachers. Books taught me how to spell and define words, develop plots, write dialogue, and most importantly, foster friendships. Today, I write horror books for young readers because I had books. With Summer Scares, I hope readers of all ages will feel invited to partake in the horror genre and find community in the sharing of scary stories.”

Russell, along with a committee of six library workers, will select three recommended fiction titles in each reading level, totaling nine Summer Scares selections. The program aims to encourage a conversation at libraries worldwide about the horror genre across all age levels and ultimately attract more adults, teens, and children interested in reading. Official Summer Scares designated authors will also make themselves available to public and school libraries.

The committee’s final selections will be announced on February 12, 2027. Russell, along with some of the selected authors, will kick off Summer Scares at the 10th Annual HWA Librarians’ Day (Friday, June 11, 2027) during StokerCon® 2027 at the Westin Pittsburgh. Click here for more information.

Additional content, including podcast appearances, free webinars with Booklist, and lists of suggested titles for further reading, will be made available by the committee and its partners beginning early in 2027 and continuing through the spring and summer. Of special note is the annual Summer Scares Programming Guide, overseen by HWA Libraries Co-Chair Konrad Stump.

“The 2027 guide, developed by the HWA Libraries team, is packed with everything library workers need to engage their communities with these great titles, including an iREAD partner title in each age group,” states Stump. “From ideas for author events, partner programs with University of Pittsburgh Library Systems, book discussion groups, and much more, this guide is the library worker’s roadmap to creating exciting and meaningful experiences for their patrons through Summer Scares that they can use as a jumping off point for future horror-themed programming.” 

The guide will be available beginning March 1, 2027, on the Summer Scares Resource page here.

To see past year’s Summer Scares titles, spokespeople, and programming guides, please visit the program archive here.

Keep your eyes peeled for more updates coming soon from Booklist, Book Riot, iREAD and NoveList®, as well as at the HWA’s website: www.horror.org and RA for All Horror. 

Questions? Reach out to HWA Libraries Co-Chairs Becky Spratford and Konrad Stump via email: libraries@horror.org.

Summer Scares 2027 Committee Members:

Ally Russell is the USA TODAY bestselling author of It Came from the Trees. Her other books include the Mystery James series, which was nominated for an Edgar Award and a Stoker Award, Down Came the Spiders, and Book of Outcasts (Wednesday). She grew up on a steady diet of Halloween parties, horror films, Unsolved Mysteries, and Goosebumps books. She has always loved scary stories, and got her MFA from Simmons University and, eventually, a job working in children’s publishing. She hails from Pittsburgh—ground zero for the zombie apocalypse. Ally lives with her husband and her black cats. She’s afraid of the woods, the dark, and heights. You can find her at @onedarkally on Instagram or allyrussellbooks.com. 

Becky Spratford is a Readers' Advisory Specialist in Illinois. She trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local public library. She runs the critically acclaimed RA training blog RA for All, writes reviews for Booklist, and  has a horror review column for Library Journal. Becky is the author of three text books for library workers and the editor of the Bram Stoker Award winning Why I Love Horror [Saga Press, 2025]. Becky is currently serving as the Horror Writers Association’s Secretary and Co-Chair of their Libraries Committee.

Konrad Stump co-chairs HWA Libraries, including the Horror Writers Association’s summer reading program Summer Scares, and StokerCon Librarians’ Day, a full day of continuing education that connects authors and librarians and provides both with the necessary tools to engage communities with the horror genre. He also coordinates the Springfield-Greene County (MO) Library’s long-running Oh, the Horror! series, an annual celebration of the horror genre. His work has appeared in Library Journal, NoveList, Booklist, Library Trends, and has been featured in Book Club Reboot: 71 Creative Twists (ALA) and The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, third edition (ALA).

Carolyn Ciesla is an academic library director in the Chicago suburbs. She previously provided spooky programming to patrons as a teen and reference librarian, and has reviewed horror titles for Booklist for several years. She also teaches horror to unsuspecting first-year university students. 

Kelly Jensen is a Senior Editor at Book Riot, the largest independent book website in North America. She covers all things young adult literature and has written about censorship for over 10 years. She is the author of three critically acclaimed and award-winning anthologies for young adults. In 2024, she was named a Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her anti-censorship work. She earned similar recognition for her work in 2022, when she was named a person of the year from Publishers Weekly and a Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Tribune. She has twice earned commendation from the American Association of School Librarians for her anti-censorship work. Prior to her work at Book Riot, Kelly was a public librarian for children, teens, and adults in several libraries in Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. Horror is her jam.

Julia Smith is a senior editor at Booklist, where she works in the youth books department and harbors a deep love of middle-grade literature. Prior to her career at Booklist, she worked at an independent children's bookstore and in the Chicago Public Library system.

Yaika Sabat (MLS) worked in public libraries before joining NoveList as a Senior Readers’ Advisory Librarian, where she develops content to help library staff connect readers with books they’ll love. She is passionate about providing inclusive, reader-centered services; encouraging libraries to embrace horror; and, helping readers explore widely across genres and formats. While horror always takes her top genre spot, she enjoys trying other genres, loves graphic novels, and is an avid audiobook listener.

Attack of the Best Lists 2026: B&N

This post is part of my year-end "Attack of the Best Lists" coverage. To see every post in my "Attack of the Best Lists 2026" coverage [and more backlist best of the year options] you can click here.

Barnes & Noble has released their Best Books 2026 portal , and they are covering a lot of bases with 17 categories including books for all ages, in every genre, fiction and nonfiction categories, in audio and ebooks, and Spanish.

From the portal landing page: 

The Best Books of 2026

Meet the Best Books of 2026. This year’s new releases took us across the universe and beyond, with stories of hope, inspiring kids’ tales, thrillers that kept us guessing, memoirs of love and loss, fascinating historical deep dives and much more. With our hand-picked assortment of reads, you’ll find something exceptional for every reader.

You can access all 17 categories here.

Of course B&N has more than one best list. The more the merrier in their eyes because ultimately they want to sell as many books as possible. And as the holidays and gift-giving opportunities approach, they want it to be as easy as possible to help you find the right books for your people.

While getting the most sales is the reason, it is nice to see the categories themselves and the books found within a continuing to be diverse and inclusive. They have categories for Best Audiobooks, Best Spanish Books for adults and kids, and multiple nonfiction categories. They are thinking about how people read and making sure they see a category that works for them, their friends, and their family.

And as a result, it works for us as we serve our readers.

Speaking of the ease at which the average reader can access enticing titles, keep a list of those B&N categories to use as display titles and conversation starters anytime of year.

You can make a display anytime of year with these categories as well especially if you use the backlist of best lists. So while at the end of a year you can use these categories as a way to ask patrons to weigh in on their best reads of the last year, you can also use these categories and the backlist "Best" options  to make genre or reading category displays anytime of year. 

Ask you patrons to help by using this link to see how to turn a conversation starter into a display. 

Access the backlist of Best titles with my attack of the best lists coverage from year to year. (Unfortunately, B&N has disabled their portal pages for past years.) 

Look for MANY more "Attack of the Best Lists" posts coming soon. 

Understanding How Our Readers Feel About AI

I have been on the record (and even have a tag for it)  that we need to "Just Say No to AI." I have written about this in response to a variety of RA related situations. 

Last week, Book Insights published their first survey gathering the thoughts of book buyers on the use of AI in books.

But before I break down the survey, I need to let you all know a little but more about Book Insights (the source of this info). From their About page:

Who buys books in the US? Nobody has asked properly in a decade. We're asking now.

bookinsights.ai is running Consumer Compass — the first comprehensive study of the US book buyer since before BookTok, Romantasy, and the rise of audio and AI. In field now, with results in November 2026. Alongside that, I work with publishers directly on getting more from the data they already have.

Consumer Compass: A syndicated study of 5,000 US book buyers. Who they are, how they find books, where they buy and more.

• AI discovery, measured directly — which tools people use to find books, and what they actually ask them

• Teenagers answering for themselves — not their parents answering for them

• Genre by genre — because "the American book buyer" is an aggeregate of very different people

Now back to what they found out about what book buyer think about AI in books in this, their first wave of results. 

One of their most interesting results is : 85% of US book buyers say a book should disclose if AI was used in writing it. Comfort with AI varies sharply by age - the demand for disclosure doesn’t.

I am concerned, but not surprised, about how many people are fine with AI as long as it is disclosed. While I myself and not fine with any AI in what I read, understanding where the general reading public lands on this issue is very important for us to know.

Click through to look at the preliminary results. Especially to the data break down by age. And remember, this is wave one. There is more data being compiled including:

• The overall makeup of the US book buyer - who they are, where they discover and buy books, how they spread their book buying across formats
• How categories look different - from who the buyer is to where they learn about new books, and what drives their purchase decisions
• How audio fits into the overall universe of book buying

Keep Book Insights bookmarked and handy. We need as many "insights" into our readers as possible, especially as we fight to educate them on what they need to "Just Say No to AI."